


Anyone By a Different Name

by Deejaymil



Series: A Picture's Worth [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: (this is not a happy plot bunny), A Rabbit of Negative Euphoria, Blind Date, F/M, Flash Fiction, Possibly Unrequited Love, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-02
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-17 07:19:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14183790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Emily's always been good at pretending.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The daily prompts are starting up again on /r/fanfiction, but I'm doing them a little differently this time around. In the interests of not running out of material and being a little more able to explore with them, instead of a single fic of tiny prompt-fills daily, I'm going to post one a week (on Mondays) of exactly 1000 words. They'll all be in this series, so if you want to follow them, follow the series--but they may not all be for Criminal Minds, and I have no idea what's coming for them!
> 
> Prompt: _A practical joke leads your character(s) to an emotional epiphany. Good or bad, they are feeling something after all of this is over._

It’s Garcia’s fault, all of it. The whole damned thing and Emily is pretty sure that she’s never, ever going to forgive her for this, except that she probably is. After all, it’s not really Garcia’s fault that Emily’s an emotionally castrated wreck with no ability to understand the functions of her own brain and heart conspiring against her.

After all, it’s not Garcia’s fault that it ends like it does.

 

It starts with a prank. Emily’s always loathed April Fool’s Day and today is looking to be no exception. She brings it on herself, really. It’s her who complains loudly that her date has fallen through for the weekend: loudly, and in ear-shot of Morgan.

“No Sinning to Win this weekend, Prentiss?” he asks with that same cocky grin she just wants to smack off his face sometimes. “That poor man whose heart you’ve broken…”

“Attachment takes considerable time to form to the point where any level of heartbreak, literal or figurative, would occur,” Reid says absently. He’s fiddling with the tiny American flag on his tie, accidentally stabbing himself in the thumb with it as Emily looks over at him.

“Literal heartbreak?” she asks. “Of the medical kind?”

“Of course. There’s plenty of documented evidence that—ow, damn.”

She’s a little disappointed that he’s been cut off from his lecture by stabbing himself with the pin again, but not so disappointed that she goads more. Instead, with Morgan revving up to continue teasing her and Garcia hanging over the railing ahead looking down, she simply scoots her chair over to Reid and takes the pin from him. If she doesn’t help him, no one will, and his hands are warm and bony under hers as he freezes at the touch.

“Never mind that, Doc,” Morgan is saying distantly. Emily is mostly blocking him out; she can feel Reid’s heartbeat thrumming in his chest as she affixes the pin back to his tie without a word, his hands suddenly clammy with tension. “Tell her to get back on the horse—find another date. Even better, let us find you one.”

“Oh no, I don’t matchmake,” Reid says, his voice overload with their proximity. Just for his sake—because he looks worried—she rolls her eyes at them. “I don’t think we should—”

“Fortunately, lovelies, I _do_ ,” Garcia chimes in. Emily looks up to find a chilling smile aimed her way, not at all offset by her pumpkin-orange hair and Easter bunny earrings. “How about it, Emily? Me and Derek, we could whip you up a man… maybe dark, tall, and handsome?”

“Don’t you dare,” she warns them, spinning her chair and shaking her head at them both. They’re a dangerous pair. Doesn’t Hotch have some kind of regulation against this? “I’m going home to do nothing but eat cereal and watch Doctor Who reruns all weekend.”

Behind her, she hears Reid’s chair creak as he straightens, and knows he’s smiling from the gleeful little _oh_ of excitement. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll offer him a bowl and a couch cushion. There are worse people to grieve her singleness with, and he makes amazing caramel popcorn.

But Garcia and Morgan just smile.

 

It continues with a text that night. ‘Found the perfect man’ it says, from Garcia. ‘You’ll never guess where I met him’.

She doesn’t really want to.

‘Don’t you dare’ she sends again.

‘Too late’ is the reply.

The next time her phone beeps, it’s Morgan: ‘Don’t worry’ his says—which just means that she immediately _is_ worried. ‘Guaranteed to make you smile’.

And she’s curious, so she agrees to go.

Damn them.

 

Damn them, she thinks again, looking up from her nice seat in the nice restaurant he’d picked and seeing what looks like Reid’s fucking doppelganger walking towards her. He looks shocked when she introduces herself as Emily—shocked, she realises, that she’s attractive and interested and here.

Wait, interested?

She’s not interested. She’s not even a little interested. Grumpy mostly, and pissed that she’s too polite to message her friends with various forms of emojis constituting the emotion ‘what the fuck this is the worst prank’, but not…

But, when she looks up and him and he smiles in a way that’s a little too nice and a little too awkward, her heart sinks. Because he’s cute and dorky and his socks match but his tie is crooked; she looks at his jawline that’s sharp and his eyes that are blue and thinks that maybe, just maybe, this has been planned for a while.

When he says, “Penny talks about you a lot,” she realises this isn’t a prank at all. It’s a genuine attempt to set her up with something they think is her type, her type apparently being Reid’s adequate twin. Adequate, she notes, because he’s ever so slightly off in small ways and it throws her.

His socks match.

She tells herself later that she’d have been more interested if they hadn’t.

She excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to use her phone, irately sending, ‘Did you think this was funny?’ to both of them.

It’s not at all surprising when she gets back ‘Do you like him???’ from Garcia, eternally hopeful for her friend’s happiness, and nothing but a winky face from Morgan. ‘He’s sweet’ she replies, and wonders if that’s enough. Is that what she wants? Sweet and almost-right and somewhat adequate, except in all the ways he isn’t. She wonders that until she has to go back out there and decides.

 

She refuses to break his heart. Before she takes him home, she tells him exactly what this is: sex and nothing else. He seems okay with this, okay in the awed kind of way that means he’s into her enough that he’s happy just getting a leg over. And maybe she’s crap at emotions, but she’s fantastic at pretend.

She’s forgotten his name but doesn’t ask for it again; in her head, she’s using a different one anyway.


	2. Only You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: _Write the most tooth-rotting sweet fluff you can for your favourite pairing, because some of you abuse those poor couples way too much. Give ‘em a break already_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... because I couldn't leave it where I left it...

Despite the fact that he’s very good at his job, Reid misses things.

Things like this.

He’s out with Morgan on one of the man’s endless hopeful quests to find Reid a girlfriend—or maybe just a hug—when they spot a familiar silhouette standing by a taxicab rank in the pouring rain. Reid pauses. He’s a little drunk and very silly right now, Morgan hanging heavily on his arm, but he knows Emily. He’d know her anywhere.

“Prentiss!” yelled Morgan, confirming Reid’s drunken suspicion. His second suspicion is confirmed two seconds later when she turns to look, and the man beside her turns with her. Reid stares. The man’s face is astoundingly familiar. It’s a face that Reid sees every morning when he shaves in front of his mirror.

“Oh, hi… hi, guys,” Emily says. With her skin pale from the cold, Reid very clearly sees her blush. “We, ah, did _not_ dress for the weather.”

She’s not looking at Reid or the man beside her as he introduces himself politely. Reid doesn’t look at him either; just at her. And he does what he’s supposed to be good at: he profiles.

Before they leave, he strips his coat and hands it to her, close enough that he’s sheltering her from the rain.

“I can’t take your coat.” She smells like alcohol. He’s dizzy with it.

“You should have told me,” he replies, pushing the coat into her arms. “I thought it was just me.”

And he walks away, knowing that Emily won’t thank him for leading her to the solution to the miserable flush to her cheeks or the way she angles herself away from her date ever so unconsciously. She has to come to him.

 

He opens his front door with hands covered in sugar to find her standing there with frizzy hair. She’s wearing his coat still. They do nothing but stare at each other for a moment, until he steps aside and lets her in, seeing her eyes rove over the bedding on his couch and his bathrobe and the bowls set on the kitchen table, the scent of popcorn in the air.

“You’re making caramel popcorn,” she says, looking at him. _Really_ looking at him, and he wonders how he’d ever missed _this_. Some profiler. “I love caramel popcorn.”

“There’s enough for two,” he offers and, when she smiles, closes the door.

 

When he kisses her, they’re sober. He’s washed his hands of the sugar, but it doesn’t matter; their lips are sticky anyway. She tastes of scotch and caramel and it’s a dizzying moment of connection.

They break apart. They breathe.

She slides her arms around him and pulls him close. Like a cat, she’s perched on the table in range of the mixing bowls; this means that when he steps into her arms, he’s between her legs and fully encompassed in her hug. Mouth resting on her hair and his hands sliding nervously around her flannel-clad sides, his heart and stomach both flip a little at the knowledge she’s in a pair of his pyjamas. Far too big for her, the legs rolled up three times and the sleeves rolled too, and she hadn’t even teased him about the dinosaur patterns on the shirt.

“You should have told me,” he says again, into that dark, damp hair.

“I was scared,” she replies.

“Of what?”

And her arms tighten around him, her face against his chest. He can feel her mouth shifting when she goes to speak and falters.

He answers for her: “Stay tonight?”

Dark eyes flicker up, her mouth the cocky smile he’s loved for longer than he cares to admit—probably longer than she’s looked at _him_ like that, that’s for sure. “Do I have a choice?” she says, and points back down to the dinosaur pjs. She does. He’d drive her anywhere she wanted. He’d give her the world if she asked.

Maybe she can see that in his eyes. Maybe she’s a better profiler than he is. He knows he loves her in that moment and she knows it too.

She still tastes like popcorn. He’s still unsure this isn’t a dream.

 

She stays the night.

 

He wakes in the morning on his couch, a comforter around them and her curled behind him, her face pressed between his shoulder-blades. It’s not comfortable—his shoulder is numb and he’s pretty sure his back is going to try to make him regret the entire thing—but he still doesn’t move. She’s warm and asleep and he’s stunned that this is his life.

“I told Simon it’s not working between us,” Emily mumbles into his shoulder, snuggling closer. “Is that presumptive? It feels presumptive.”

Reid rolls over with difficulty, folding further into her and being secretly gleeful that this tips him closer yet. They’re cuddled from their legs to their arms, breathing together in some kind of timeless unison, and he’s never felt quite so safe before.

“Did you like him?” he asks, needing to know, not wanting.

“I liked pretending I did,” she answers after a pause. “I liked… how easy it was.”

There’s a conversation here they need to have and it’s full of thorns and knots and tough decisions, because nothing they’re starting will be easy, or smart, but neither is it something Reid is willing to throw out without a chance. He just nods, bringing his fingers to her cheek to tug a strand of hair from her mouth, and says, “Well, I know what else is easy.”

“What?”

He kisses her as he says it, soft and kind and a little bit husky, and he’s never seen a woman go from sleepy and worried to aroused so quickly.

“Popcorn for breakfast,” he whispers throatily into her ear.

She laughs, rolling him from the couch with a quick shove and a yelp from him as he hits the ground. “Oh jeez,” she teases, rolling on top of him and purring the words. “You had me at ‘easy’.”


End file.
